beinart

It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen—in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment. – Philip Dick

LI knows exactly what Dick is talking about. Or perhaps I should say – America in general knows exactly what Dick is talking about. Except – do we? Do we, Walt-Whitman-Alan-Ginsburg-Muddy-Waters' America? Case in point is Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight. We ignored the excerpt in the NYT magazine, but we knew it wasn’t going to go away.

Beinart has taken a page and a phrase from the Weekly Standard, and issued a call for a liberal foreign policy of ‘American greatness.’ To make his case, he unfolds a narrative of stalwart cold war liberalism – Truman, Kennedy and (not mentioned in the TPM post, but surely a presence) Henry Jackson. Beinart proposes to be our modern Kennan. Kennan’s memo about Russia gave an intellectual blessing to Truman’s anti-communist/security state program. Out of that fountainhead issued the CIA, the expanded and never contracted Pentagon, SAC, the interventions starting in Greece and ending in Angola, etc., etc. Beinart correctly sees that this liberalism had a double face, with the domestic side using foreign policy as an excuse (or, I suppose Beinart would say, as a platform) for expanding the role of government in the economy, gradually forcing the governing class to expand civil rights, and construct a welfare society. Beinart does like to lard his punditry with the kind of prophetic vistas that real estate salesmen selling houses near paper mills put in their pitches.

“In the liberal vision, it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional. Because we recognize that we can be corrupted by unlimited power, we accept the restraints that empires refuse. That is why the Truman administration self-consciously shared power with America’s democratic allies, although we comprised one half of the world’s GDP and they were on their knees.
Moral humility breeds international restraint. That restraint ensures that weaker countries welcome our preeminence, and thus, that our preeminence endures. It makes us a great nation, not a predatory one. At home, because America realizes that it does not embody goodness, it does not grow complacent. Rather than viewing American democracy as a settled accomplishment to which others aspire, we see ourselves as engaged in our own democratic struggle, which parallels the one we support abroad. It was not the celebration of American democracy that inspired the world in the 1950s and 1960s, but America’s wrenching efforts—against McCarthyism and segregation—to give our democracy new meaning. Then, as now, the threat to national greatness stems not from self- doubt, but from self- satisfaction.”

Beinart realizes that this vision isn’t shared by all liberals – in fact, it is increasingly scoffed at – and responds to that scoffing much like Mildred Pierce finally owning up to the moral flaws of her daughter:

“This vision has sometimes divided liberals themselves. Recognizing American fallibility means recognizing that the United States cannot wield power while remaining pure. From Henry Wallace in the late 1940s to Michael Moore after September 11, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world.”

America shedding its moral innocence is a phrase that Mencken would certainly have loved – it concentrates, in one butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth phrase, a flabbiness of vision so comprehensive that one could run a think tank on it for a year.

For good and ill, America has never been morally innocent. The unjustified transfer of the qualities of a human being to a nation can insensibly lead to the idea that nations are also, at one time, babies. But nations are at no time babies. Nations are conceived in fire and blood, and they would not survive for a day if they were not so designed that they served the interests of the most powerful class within them. Rather than innocence, America suffers most from moral ignorance –from an inability to deduce, from the chain of actions that constitute its history with other nations, the co-extensive tendencies and structures that have been built up inside this country. If I continually find myself with a hangover on waking up in the morning, I should, as a rational person, deduce that I have a tendency to drink too much – and not that I think so much about virtue and God that my brain hurts.

Unfortunately, in the twentieth century, the culture and political economy of war has become so strong in America that the country has a hard time shedding it even when, as now, it has become counter-productive. Beinart’s problem actually is in seeing that war has a price – even wars that are won have a price that they exact from the victor nation. That is what makes the phrase ‘good war’ so satanic – it attaches people to war under false pretenses. While it might be good to win a war, it is never good to wage one – it is, at best, necessary. But when you have promoted the habit of war, both by grossly inflating the war related economy within your country and by childishly refusing to examine your country’s interests in the context of military conflict –substituting rhetoric about national greatness for the reality of the compromises between justice and economic and political interests that must determine any nation’s foreign policy – you have ceased to analyze at all. You have started to maunder.

In his response to Beinart, Max Sawiky takes out a sawed off shotgun and puts a load of double ought in the quivering jello of the national greatness thing. Myself, I wish only to indicate that Beinart's argument is part of a larger argument that is not being joined. The larger argument is that the Cold War is not a model, but a deleterious compulsion to which the elite go back because they have lost their sense for alternatives. In fact, the thing America needs to do least, at the moment, is hold fast in the long war against ‘jihadist totalitarianism’ – Beinart’s comic phrase for the barely controlled anarchy that has, so far, infested only one state that we know of, Afghanistan during the 90s. Unless he is subtly suggesting we should sneak attack Saudi Arabia. That we should orient our whole foreign policy to preventing other Afghanistans is perhaps the dumbest thing he suggests – it competes with the inability, at least in the excerpts, to recognize that the Cold War mentality actually vitiated America’s war against Osama bin Laden, since that war was fought, as it were, absent-mindedly – while the troops were closing in on Tora Bora, the commander, in Tampa, and the Secretary of War, in D.C., were dreaming of Iraq. And so the best of all possible worlds was formed, by accident and intention – Osama escapes, terrorism is on tap, and the ‘jihadist threat’ can be pulled out of a hat anytime to justify more military malarkey. It really is a minor threat, but, frustratingly, the last people who will treat it as a threat are the same people who continually tell us it is a major threat. They treat Al Qaeda the way the producers of Friday the 13th treated Freddie Krueger – as a dependable monster generating an infinite amount of sequels.

Beinart’s history – his idea that we should revive cold war liberalism now, rolling out the references to Truman, to Kennedy, to the Missile Crisis, etc., – reminds me of what Gibbon said about Constantine’s arch. Constantine, to celebrate himself and his new capital city, demanded a triumphant monument. But there was a small problem in building one from scratch:

“To revive the genius of Phidias and Lysippus, surpassed indeed the power of a Roman emperor; but the immortal productions which they had bequeathed to posterity were exposed without defence to the rapacious vanity of a despot. By his commands the cities of Greece and Asia were despoiled of their most valuable ornaments.The trophies of memorable wars, the objects of religious veneration, the most finished statues of the gods and heroes, of the sages and poets, of ancient times, contributed to the splendid triumph of Constantinople; and gave occasion to the remark of the historian Cedrenus, who observes, with some enthusiasm, that nothing seemed wanting except the souls of the illustrious men whom these admirable monuments were intended to represent. But it is not in the city of Constantine, nor in the declining period of an empire, when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery, that we should seek for the souls of Homer and of Demosthenes.”

Depressed by the civil and religious slavery of the Bush era, I don’t think we should seek for the souls of FDR and John Kennedy in the bodies of Hilary Clinton and Joe Liberman.

just like king Nebuchnezzar's blues

Well, LI is on a tight schedule due to work this week. So we are going to have to be uncharacteristically close mouthed. We do recommend the Peter Popham article about Venice – since, obviously, the aim of this site is to highlight every fucking depressing fact we can cull from the World disaster and howl before it – or at least low, like Nebuchnezzar among the grass blades.

“The only practicable way to keep out the high tides, engineers decided, was to have gates fixed to the lagoon floor that would hinge upwards to close it off to at times of emergency. And so the Moses scheme was drawn up, envisaging 78 massive gates, each 28m wide and 18m long, fixed to the lagoon floor.

The politicians then sat down and chewed the idea over. For the best part of 30 years. There were a hundred different views on the project, and the damage it could do. It wouldn't work at all. It would cause the lagoon to fill with stagnant water, it would kill of the lagoon's ecological diversity. It was a scam by capitalist corporations to make a killing at the city's expense. Governments in Rome came and went - at the rate of about two per year - without taking the difficult decision.
Finally, three years ago, then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi cried "Basta!" and set the project in motion. The first stone, bearing his name and ceremonially set in place by him, is now at the bottom of the lagoon.”

Popham gives his undivided support to this project to save Venice. Things are bad in several ways in Venice. For instance, the population in the city of Venice proper is at the lowest point since –well, the 13th century? Unfortunately, the object of ire in Popham’s article, the new mayor of Venice and his opposition to Moses, isn’t properly described – he is only decried. Popham concedes that 20th century ‘improvements’ have played havoc with Venice:

“The man-made Venice Lagoon has three inlets from the sea. The industrialisation of the lagoon during the 20th century, the destruction of sand banks and their replacement by concrete ones, and the digging of canals to allow big ships to enter, have made the lagoon far more vulnerable to floods, experts say. Conditions inside and outside are today more or less the same.”

However, he seems to view the Moses project as unquestionable. We wonder. We do think that John Kay’s proposal that Venice be turned over to Disney – much as Times Square, at least in spirit, has been – must be making Ruskin turn over in his grave. This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but with Goofy, Pocahontas and the Lion King. As Eliot might have said – although, stuffing his pockets with cash from Cats, who know what he would have really said.

the sycophant's dilemma

No American writer would have fit as easily into court society – whether in Idi Amin’s Kampala or in Caesar Borgia’s Rome – as Fred Barnes. The man is not just your average D.C. ass kisser. He is somehow beyond that. He is to flattery what de Sade was to cruelty: there is a sexual relish in his praises of our present Commander in Chief that was embodied by that wonderful crotch shot pic on the cover of his last book, Rebel in Chief. Latent homoeroticism be damned – the sexual excitements of other people are, of course, sealed by seals even the angels in Revelations can't unlock, but obviously the zipper of our Rebel in Chief and the sacred object found behind it fills Barnes with an eagerness, a reverence that he has as much difficulty mastering as I have comprehending. But there it is, unabashed, unashamed. His career of abasement before right wing thugs (two thumbs up, Benito Mussolini!) has created a prose style that is the equivalent of a dog wagging its tail while it begs for a biscuit, except that dogs have constraints built into their body talk from which Barnes, who is rumored to be human, is free, using as he often does something like language.

Which is all by way of recommending Barnes’ article on Jeb Bush in the Weekly Standard. In it, Barnes has created a new philosophical conundrum: the sycophant’s dilemma. It is a variant of the Buridan's ass problem. You remember, there are two equally delicious piles of hay put before an ass, one on the right, one on the left. Which will the ass prefer, and why? In Barne’s version of the conundrum, we have two male, oh so testosteroni, oh so rockstar, squeezingly male Bushes put before the ravished eyes of our groupie. Now, which shall receive the higher praise? Is it to be our Rebel in Chief – so precious, so manly, so mission is accomplished? Or is it the leaner, meaner Jeb? So Christian that one remembers the sexy pictures of Jesus from Sunday School, so cut the government and cut taxes that one can almost imagine him stepping over the starved and dessicated bodies of poor people (but then, Rebel in Chief one ups him – for who has done more to kill off poor people than our Katrina Kommando!). So you can see, Barnes is in a sexual stew:

“Friends of Jeb compare him favorably with his brother, but they're wary of doing it on the record. One former Republican governor insisted that Jeb Bush "is far more gifted than his brother or his father," the elder President Bush. A consultant who knows both Jeb and George says, "Jeb is excellent and George is above average."
The conventional wisdom is that Jeb is the smart one who thinks through issues, and George is merely savvy and acts on instinct. That's a media myth. Both think alot before they act. And they agree on many things. JebBush has visited Iraq and backs the policy there. He agrees with his brother on immigration and taxes and soon.
But there are significant differences, so many that conservative activist Grover Norquist says, "Jeb Bush is adopted." There's no "genetic mix" with his father or his brother, according to Norquist. He is joking, of course, to highlight the ideological gap between Jeb and the Bush family. Jeb Bush is a small government conservative. He was feted in Washington in 2003 by the libertarian Cato Institute and talks about having a "libertarian gene." President Bush has no such gene. He's what I call a strong government conservative and others refer to as a big government conservative. True, President Bush is closer ideologically to President Reagan than to his father, a moderate. But Jeb Bush is closer to Reagan than his brother is.”

Delight and anguish deliciously mix here in much the same way they mixed in the soul of Humbert Humbert, bringing bad domestic news to his step daughter, Lo.

Here are other Barnesisms from the article:

“But Jeb Bush has turned out to be the superior governor of the two. He's the most powerful chief executive in Florida in modern times and has had a positive impact on the state in almost every conceivable way--economically, fiscally, educationally, politically, and the list could go on and on.”

“In this state, he is the guy," House Democratic leader Dan Gelber told Wil S. Hylton of GQ magazine. "Everybody else is not even in the ballpark. He's a rock star."”

“Bush, after handling eight hurricanes and four tropical storms in 14 months in 2004 and 2005, has become the undisputed national leader in emergency management.”
“…his command of the intricacies of policy … a hands-on governor, Bush is a workaholic…he learned how to project his charm and likability …He's not only a limited government conservative, but a social and religious conservative as well…”

The list could go on and on... LI has read Penthouse Letters that are less heated. (In fact, we did an article, years ago, about erotica writers, and mostly they were a glum crew. But somehow I think Barnes' loves his fantasies even in his off hours). It is, in its own perverse, disgusting way, inspiring. While I’d say that the last five years of Bush culture have rank up there with the last five years of Ceauşescu’s rule for tawdry failure, corruption, and an indictment of the country’s civilization as a whole, it is a little cheering to know that one man, getting to share body space in the same room, sometimes, some record-it-in-your-pillow-diary-times, with the Rebel in Chief (oh, and he shook my hand. I will never wash this hand again! Ever! I swear it diary.) is living his dream life, shuttling between Bush brothers. These are the best years of Fred Barnes' life, make no mistake about it. That he is a prominent media personality, on TV whenever he wants to be, is the sad thing – his dream life being our national nightmare and all, you know.

other great american massacres we can compare haditha to

World War II has certainly been turned into the strangest referent. Like Baptists figuring out where they stand on witches by looking at Leviticus, the war party feels better if they can invoke, in the most ridiculous ways, WWII.

Recently, Bill O’Reilly tried to justify Haditha by referring to Americans slaughtering Nazis at Malmedy. He had that a bit wrong – it was the Nazis who were slaughtering the Americans. The tonier purlieus of the WAPO op ed page shows how to right the big Fox guy’s blunder, publishing a heartwarming tale by the father of a GI, Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer comes out of the gate a bit ahead of O’Reilly: for instance, he claims to have read a book. The book is Norman Lewis’ Naples ’44. This is a book that is foreign to the O'reilly fan base. In this book, there are no Clancy like descriptions of the latest secret American weaponry; there are no muscular Navy Seals; and there is no obligatory sex scene – by which I mean using high tech weaponry to blow suitable enemies limb from limb, while hopefully maintaining the level of pain along their nervous system for as long as possible. Thus, we can differentiate between the audience of B.R. and the audience of Schaeffer. I would call Schaeffer’s audience the decent. The centrists. The muscular liberals.

Schaeffer quotes the following passage from Lewis' book:
“"I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.'

"I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order.

"We liberated them from the Fascist Monster. And what is the prize? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared to us."

Luckily, though, we know that all came right in the end. For why was the U.S. in WWII? To selflessly bring democracy to Italy and Germany. And Japan. That Italy was ruled for fifty years by the same party, or that the U.S. spent large sums to make sure that this was the case, which might be called bribery, treachery, and non-democratic, is one of those penny ante lefty objections.

“Judging by Lewis's diary -- and many other accounts -- the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II was often badly led and worse-behaved, and was certainly less merciful than our present-day soldiers and their leaders. We haven't carpet-bombed Baghdad or nuked Fallujah to spare the lives of our troops. Yet most Americans are glad we forced Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means.”

Yet one wonders – how about the marvelous massacres of other U.S. wars? Surely Schaeffer should dig down and find other great things the Great Spirit has led Americans to do. I’d recommend the Sand River Massacre. There, now, was a massacre. Men women and children. But who can doubt that we had the best interests of the American Indians at heart? We were only trying to force them to join a democracy, however brutal the means.

Here’s an account of it:

"The attack was initially reported in the press as a victory against a bravely-fought opponent. Within weeks, however, eyewitnesses came forward offering conflicting testimony, leading to a military investigation and two Congressional investigations into the events.

Starting in the late 1850's, the gold rush in the Rocky Mountains, then part of the western Kansas Territory, had brought a flood of white settlers into the mountains and the surrounding foothills. The sudden immigration came into conflict with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho Indians who inhabited the area, eventually leading to the Colorado War in 1864.

Conflict between the Native Americans and the miners spread, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes made wagon travel extremely dangerous across Colorado's eastern plains. The warriors had been harassing white settlers with scattered Indian raids. Territorial governor John Evans sent Col. John Chivington to quiet the Indians at the head of a locally-raised militia. After a few skirmishes and an effective warpath on the part of the Indians, many of the Cheyennes and Arapahos were ready for peace and camped near Fort Lyon on the eastern plains.

Early in September, Maj. Edward W. Wynkoop arranged a peace meeting between Gov. John Evans of Colorado Territory and several chiefs from the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian tribes. When he received word of Wynkoop's plans, commanding Gen. Samuel R. Curtis sent word that there would not be any peace could be made until he approved the terms and until the guilty Indians first were punished for their depredations.

Both of the tribes had recently signed a treaty with the United States in which they ceded their lands to the United States and agreed to move to the Indian reservation to the south of Sand Creek in Oklahoma, demarcated by a line to be run due north from a point on the northern boundary of New Mexico, 15 miles west of Purgatory River, and extending to the Sandy Fork of the Arkansas River.

Black Kettle, one chief of a group of mostly Southern Cheyennes and some Arapahoes, some 800 in number, reported to Fort Lyon in an effort to declare peace.

While the Indians waited for negotiations to begin, they camped at Sand Creek, 40 miles northeast of Fort Lyon, believing they were safe, having complied with the white man's demands to lay down their arms. Feeling comfortable he sent out most of his warriors to hunt. Against the advice of military officers and civilians, Col. John M. Chivington, commanding the District of Colorado under Curtis, led the 950 100-day men of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, the 1st Colorado with its 2 howitzers, and a detachment of the 1st New Mexico Infantry in reprisal against the Indians. The men of the 3rd Colorado had been recruited to put down the outbreak of hostilities that had begun after the Regular Army was transferred east in 1861. With their enlistments about to expire, they were eager for revenge.
On November 29, at sunrise, Chivington's troops reached the Indian village. To prevent escape, they seized the Indians' ponies and unlimbered the howitzers, training them on the still-sleeping Cheyennes and Arapaho. Soldiers attacked the village from 3 sides. When he saw the troops approaching, Black Kettle, chief of the Cheyenne, raised the U.S. flag over his lodge as a gesture of peace. Chivington also ignored the pleas of interpreter John Smith to break off the attack, and his men began shooting indiscriminately, following his orders to not take any prisoners.
Some of the warriors seized their weapons and formed a battle line 1/2 mile above the camp at Sand Creek, but their defense collapsed before overwhelming odds. The Indians contested the soldiers' pursuit for 5 miles before dispersing into the countryside. One officer, Capt. Silas Soule, a Massachusetts abolitionist, refused to follow Chivington's orders. He did not allow his cavalry company to fire into the crowd.

Estimates of the number of Indians at the encampment range between 500-1,000; 400-600 were killed, many of them women and children whose bodies had been mutilated.

Public reactions to the brutal massacre ranged from approval to condemnation, but many blamed Chivington for having committed an unpardonable act of violence that resulted in a renewed outburst of hostilities.”

As everybody can see from this account, the Indians actually formed a line to defend themselves, or so the hate America crowd would call it, against American troops. So much for their story of victimage – these people refused to be killed peacefully by our troops. When I say our troops, you know I have a lump in my throat. A lump as big as Mount Rushmore. I always have a lump in my throat when I think of American troops. I also have a hardon, but the less said about that, the better.

As many have pointed out about Haditha, the Iraqi child can be one of your craftiest enemies. It is best to shoot him in the cradle, which, in the afterlife, he will appreciate – this is how you force him to be democratic. This is what democracy is about. Similarly, can anyone doubt that looking down from heaven, those Indians slaughtered much like the Philistines by the Israelites can only be grateful that American troops were there to make them do what’s right, or pay the penalty?
The Schaeffer’s of the world also give LI a lump in his throat. But weirdly enough, not a hardon. Funny, that.

historicality and the one armed nun

When Tom Paine came back to the U.S. in 1802, he wrote a series of letters to sorta reintroduce himself. He began by giving his impression of the New New World, as though he were the survivor of a shipwreck – and indeed, the tone and the some of the sentences irresistibly evoke Ishmael:

“AFTER an absence of almost fifteen years, I am again returned to the country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I contributed my part.
When I sailed for Europe, in the spring of 1787, it was my intention to return to America the next year, and enjoy in retirement the esteem of my friends, and the repose I was entitled to. I had stood out the storm of one revolution, and had no wish to embark in another. But other scenes and other circumstances than those of contemplated ease were allotted to me. The French revolution was beginning to germinate when I arrived in France. The principles of it were good, they were copied from America, and the men who conducted it were honest. But the fury of faction soon extinguished the one, and sent the other to the scaffold. Of those who began that revolution, I am almost the only survivor, and that through a thousand dangers. I owe this not to the prayers of priests, nor to the piety of hypocrites, but to the continued protection of Providence.

But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe, I saw with regret the lustre of it fading in America. In less than two years from the time of my departure some distant symptoms painfully suggested the idea that the principles of the revolution were expiring on the soil that produced them.”

The divide between 1776 and 1802 is considerable – an abyss. Which brings us to Andrew Abbott’s brilliant essay on the individual and the social structure that LI mentioned in our next to last post.

(We warned you that we were coming back to this topic, gentle reader!)

Abbott gets right to the point with a sentence that makes the Marx-y heart sink: “I wish to argue this afternoon that we should reinstate individuals as an important force in history.” But instead of giving us some implausible ideology a la Ludwig von Mises, Abbott has in mind something a bit more interesting, if a lot less heroic.

“To be sure, social structure can and sometimes does confer on particular individuals extraordinary power to shape the future. But the crucial explanatory question in such cases is not the quality or actions of that individual, interesting as these might be. Rather it is the conditions under which such social structures emerge and stabilize.”

Abbott begins by examining one problem with the individual, viewed in terms of the living trajectory he embodies through history: although we like to think that the periodizations of history have a real counterpart, actually, there are insurmountable difficulties in putting bottom and top bounds on these ‘things’. They are fictions. Worse, as we understand more about the effects of boundaries – via the complexity people – we see that the boundaries aren’t, and can’t be, neutral. In other words, the Weberian ideal type, the modality into which periodization is packed, isn’t just a summing over histories but a selection of ending and beginning points that inevitably effects the whole set. If this sounds like a pomo complaint about metanarratives, it is – but the interesting thing is that the pomo critique instantly transmuted into another failed attempt at periodization. The other option seemed to be sheer nihilism.

Abbott considers these options briefly, with the example of the sociological study of careers – something he has done a lot of in his work. And then he comes to the point he wants to defend:

“In brief, I shall argue that the sheer mass of the experience that individuals carry forward in time—what we might think of in demographic terms as the present residue of past cohort experience—is an immense social force. It is all too easy to ignore this force, for we fall into that ignorance almost inevitably when we take up periodized historical thinking as we so often do when we work at the group level. But the vast continuity of individuals over time in fact forbids periodic analysis, however convenient it may be. In short, individuals are central to history because it is they who are the prime reservoir of historical connection from past to present. This is what I mean by the historicality of individuals.”

Now I know what my readers are saying – you are saying, isn’t this some disguised reintroduction of that awful Dilthey crap about generations? Hey, you in the back, I do not appreciate the joke about Dilthey and the one armed nun, capisce?

Okay, the thought crossed my mind too, but Abbott makes a pretty strong case – one that could be strengthened by using the materialization of memory – newspapers, diaries, movies, media in general – as a strong form of that cohort experience.

One other theoretical note, and then let’s get down to Abbott’s cases:

“Let me start by saying in a little more detail what I mean by historicality. In the first instance, I mean continuity over time. And I argue that individuals have continuity over time to a degree that social structures do not. Note that we assume this relative dominance of individual continuity whenever we
make the common (and somewhat questionable) remark that social change is getting faster and faster. This assertion involves the assumption that individuals last longer than social structures, for only then do they have to endure the changes in the latter and hence come to realize the rapidity of its change.
In a world of which it can be said that social change in it is happening faster and faster, that is, it must be the historical continuity of individuals that provides the sinews linking past and present. It is the historicality of individuals that enables us, even forces us, to know social change.”

Now, what does it mean to say that individuals have continuity over time that social structures lack? This might strike us as exactly backwards. This is how Abbott explains it, first using the example of the corporation and the changes in its various persona – the famous intangible capital of corporations, and then going on to other social organizations:

“… the vast majority of social structures are not corporations or even formal organizations.They are things like neighborhoods, occupations, newspaper readerships, church congregations, social classes, ethnicities, technological communities, and consumption groups: often disorganized or unorganized but nonetheless consequential as social structures. These often do not have formal records. If they do, these records are often of diverse kind, changing rapidly over time. And even their nonrecorded memories are scattered through diverse people having diverse relations to them.Only a few members of them have more than a miniscule connection with the whole body of those memories. Such social structures have quite diaphanous historicality. Their vast riot of memories is embodied in neither a few persons nor a legal being. Because their memories are widely distributed and their records often weak, such structures can change quickly and easily. There is little to keep them coherent over time. My discipline of sociology, for example, has been something like a social reality for about a century. In that period it has drifted quite rapidly from being a progressive and fairly religious common interest group of do-gooders, reformers, and political academics to a group of highly professionalized social scientists with an exclusive disciplinary association that aims to produce college teachers. Much of the reason for this change lies in the sheer ease with which the discipline can forget its past—a past that is expiring as I speak in decent silence in the minds of emeritus colleagues.”

Hmm, this post is getting overlarge. LI will do a couple more posts, going from Abbott to Paine to the end of the target cities of the Cold War – as LI pursues our eternal white whale, what went wrong with America????

bliss it was to be alive...

LI’s faithful reader, Mr. New York Pervert, left a comment a few days ago about the Homeland Security redistribution of Homeland Security money away from NYC and Washington D.C. and towards St. Louis and Kansas City – on the premise that the heartland is threatened with imminent attack, whereas whose ever heard of a hick place like New York City?

The woman who headed the “defund the places that we are supposed to secure” project for Homeland Security, Tracy Henke, is a piece of work. I mean, in the sense of a joy forever. The Bush culture has produced its flashes in the pan, but one can only hope that Henke is as immortal as, well, Ponzi. There was a bit about her in the Washington Post that has not, I’m surprised to see, been circulating around the bloggysphere. So, doing my part, here’s the cherry of it:


Henke had caused a ruckus last year when she demanded that a Justice Department report on racial disparities in police treatment of blacks in traffic cases be taken out of a news release. A respected career employee was demoted after protesting the move.
But indications are that Henke's working hard and handling her new post -- an important job to make sure scarce anti-terrorism money is spent effectively across the country -- with appropriate priorities.
Take this e-mail she sent to staff members last week:
"Another item I mentioned during the All-Hands meeting was the need to seek suggestions on how we can neatly encapsulate what we do at G&T to help others understand (inside and out of the department)," Henke wrote. She went on to say that when she was at the Justice Department her job included handing out money, being a contact beacon for states and local communities and helping victims of crime. "I used the 'Santa Claus, Batman and Mother Teresa' analogy" to sum up the functions.
But here's the problem. "Mother Teresa won't work for G&T," she wrote. "I requested that you think about and submit suggestions for another analogy to fill in the blank 'Santa Claus, Batman and ______.' This analogy is not for publication, but to be used in conversation to assist individuals in understanding the great work, activities and possibilities of G&T. Several of you have sent suggestions. Thank you for your interest and great ideas.
"To make certain that everyone has the opportunity to participate and to be involved," she wrote, "I have asked Anne Voigt [an aide] to chair a short-term committee to work on this for me. If you could please e-mail your suggestions to Anne . . . she will assemble the options. I ask that if you are interested in helping her, please e-mail her your name by COB on Tuesday, March 7. She will put the names in a hat (bowl or anything else we can find) and we will pick the other individuals to serve on the short-term committee with her.
"This committee will narrow the options down to no more than three and we will then have an all-hands vote to select the 'Santa Claus, Batman and ?' The individual whose suggestion is selected will be invited to lunch with me," she wrote, "my treat."

Feel safer already, don't you?”

Oh, what bliss to be ruled by people like this! The worst, the most idiotic, the most incompetent, the most mendacious, the one’s without a single redeeming social virtue, have created a sort of amusement park in D.C. for their own kind. My cold spectator’s heart brims with joy – every day, they simply give. And give some more. My only complaint -- and it is a teeny one -- is that they live on this planet. It would be nice if they were ruling another planet. That's all. A minor complaint, but I thought I'd put it out there.

The birth of HP out of the spirit of DEFCON

Heidegger’s critique of the subject was aimed at getting metaphysics out of the magic circle of the subject; for this purpose he used the term Dasein. In 1945, according to Eileen Welsome’s Plutonium Files, the medical staff at a Rochester hospital went Heidegger one better. The staff began injecting unwitting patients with plutonium in an experiment conducted in tandem with other doctors across the country, organized by the Department of War – and eventually absorbed by the Atomic Energy Commission. The staff referred to the patients as HP – Human Product.

We are all HP now, processed through 60 years of DEFCON [defense condition] culture. One of the truths of the post 9/11 period that LI holds to be self evident is that after 9/11, everything was the same – except more so. The trillion dollars of extra spending on the military has, of course, done everything except capture the 4 or 5 thousand people who attacked on 9/11 – for they now serve the vital function of being the threat on tap. Although there are always threats on tap, they volunteered. And DEFCON culture, and all of us HP, leaped to the challenge.

In LI’s last post about Bellarchy, we promised we’d be back for Bellarchy 2, like some subdeb Hollywood blockbuster. But we have been unable to piece together all the symbols that we’ve been gathering to illustrate the War State. LI is in a poetic mood, not a discursive one – we can see meanings, but we can’t directly tell you what they are. These things strike, you know. For we have one, overriding question, which is this: how did the war state create plug and play HP? The culture of acquiescence? In a story published in the WAPO about the Hanson Plutonium Plant in Richland, Washington a few years ago, there was a passage that seems so richly symbolic that we know it means something larger, something on a Delillo scale:

“Richland sprouted Atomic Bowling Lanes, an Atomic Body Shop, Atomic TV Repair, even an "Atomic Man." He was Harold McCloskey, a technician who survived a 1976 accident at Hanford that sprayed his face with the largest human dose of radiation ever recorded. He became the most thoroughly studied nuclear victim in America. Baggies of his feces and urine (labeled "Caution Radioactive") were stored for years in laboratory refrigerators and freezers across the Hanford site. After the accident, McCloskey was almost blind and his face could set off Geiger counters 50 feet away. But he was pro-Hanford until the end (he died of a heart attack in 1987). "Just forget about me being anti-nuclear, because I'm not," he said a decade after the accident. "We need nuclear energy."
Football players from Richland High wore a mushroom cloud on their helmets and called themselves the Bombers. The symbol of the atom was carved atop stone columns at the entrance to the cemetery. When liberated from federal ownership and allowed self-government in 1958, Richland's residents staged a simulated atomic explosion in a vacant lot on the edge of town. And when the Cold War began to wind down, announcement of the closure of N reactor, one of Hanford's largest, brought mournful Tri-Citians into the streets by the thousands. They held candles and sang "Kumbaya."”
Kumbaya! The HP beast slouches towards the perfect anthem, the favorite song of my Vacation Bible School days back there in Clarkston, Georgia. Someone’s dying Lord – and it is us HP, mourning the amazing structures of the Cold War, the architecture, the fallout, the atom soldiers, the preparedness, the dictionary of acronyms and phrases, the way we turned, turned, turned.
Thomas Paine wrote, in the Rights of Man:
“As war is the system of Government on the old construction, the animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.”

Paine’s words have been kidnapped for many reasons – they’ve been kidnapped to justify the ‘moral interventionist’ position of perpetual war and domination by U.S. However, for LI, what is important is the idea that war is a system – a system of the state. LI feels – instinctively – that the Defcon system is connected to the present, systematic inability to deal with the problems that have emerged with the treadmill of production as it is currently maintained. That war and environmental disaster are mutually dependent. But we aren’t sure how to go from that instinct, a bias really, to an argument. In a future post, we are going to make an argument about the geneology of HP through a detour – a consideration of an article by Andrew Abbott published last year in the Social Science History journal, The Historicality of Individuals.

PS - though it has been getting zip publicity, the Defense Department's grotesque proposal to test 700 tons of high explosive to simulate the effects of a low-yield nuclear explosion named (oh, the inevitability of names) Divine Strake (a name o redolent of Rumsfeldianism that surely its mere mention sends Midge Decter, Rummy's official panagyrist, into spasms of sexual passion) has been postponed -- due, perhaps, to protests mounted by downwinders in Nevada and Utah. The proposed test would scatter soil that has been well and truly irradiated by years of nuclear testing over Southern Utah -- once again.